Setup the mirror by following the steps described here.

If you want to enable OS upgrades using do-release-upgrade make sure you include $release-proposed packages in the mirror script, e.g., precise-proposed. Additionally, you have to add main/dist-upgrader-all to the $section in your script as debmirror silently ignores some directories.

I attached our modified script to include current releases

Enable Ubuntu release upgrade from the local mirror
--------------------------------------...

While you can set your own font in your terminal or other tools, it will not change the default "Monospace" font that some applications use.

To change that, edit ~/.fonts.conf and add settings for the "monospace" family. Here is how it looks on my machine now:

<fontconfig>
  <match target="pattern">
    <test qual="any" name="family">
      <string>monospace</string>
    </test>
    <edit name="family" mode="assign">
      <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>
...

Modern cameras often produce JPEGs that have a "I should be rotated 90° to the left" flag. If you process such pictures using Carrierwave this will be ignored and you'll end up with a wrongly rotated image.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix:

In your Uploader, add

process :auto_orient # this should go before all other "process" steps

def auto_orient
  manipulate! do |image|
    image.tap(&:auto_orient)
  end
end

Note: You can add the process :auto_orient outside of all your version blocks and it will apply...

JavaScript engines such as Google’s V8 (Chrome, Node) are specifically designed for the fast execution of large JavaScript applications. As you develop, if you care about memory usage and performance, you should be aware of some of what’s going on in your user’s browser’s JavaScript engine behind the scenes.

Rarely, you might want to rebuild all gems with native extensions, because they might be compiled against outdated system libraries, resulting in some warnings or even segfaults or other ruby errors.

You can do that using

gem pristine --all

This will reset all gems to a pristine state as if you'd reinstall them, and as a side effect, rebuild all native extensions.

The above command will also help you sorting out errors like this after a distribution upgrade:

libmysqlclient_r.so.16: cannot open shared object file: No such fil...

Installation differs slightly from older versions, please check the README.

YourClass.reflect_on_all_associations.map(&:name)

Get the class name by calling class_name, or the type of the association (belongs_to, has_many,...) by calling macro

Ever wanted to preview a pattern from Subtle Patterns on your site without the hassle of swapping out images and modifying CSS?

Subtle Patterns Preview provides a simpler way to do it.

gleeBox is an experimental project that takes a keyboard-centric approach to navigating the web. It provides alternatives to actions that are traditionally performed via the mouse. Some of these are radically more efficient than using a mouse, some not so much. In all cases, they are mostly meant for keyboard and command line lovers.

Gleebox is a terrific plugin that makes navigating through webpages a wink. It even allows for selecting by jQuery selector.

Icon fonts like Font Awesome are infinitely scalable, look great on high-DPI displays and will give your app a modern look.

However, icon fonts can be very awkward to use compared to raster icons. Elements are given icons by giving them a special class like icon-plus or icon-home:

<span class="icon-plus">Create</span>

The icon font's stylesheet will then recognize this class and insert the icon as the element's :before style.

In practic...

You can use scheme-less URLs (or protocol-relative URLs) to have browsers use the current protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) when loading content referenced with such an URL.

A protocol relative URL doesn’t contain a protocol. For example, http://stevesouders.com/images/book-84x110.jpg becomes //stevesouders.com/images/book-84x110.jpg

Browsers substitute the protocol of the page itself for the resource’s missing protocol. Problem solved!

But:

Internet Explorer 7 & 8 will download st...

Having your site run on SSL is worthless when you include content over an unsafe connection (HTTP).

Here is how to hunt down mixed content with Firefox.

How to enable mixed content alerts

If your Firefox does not warn you about mixed content on pages (mine did not), you can enable it again:

Visit about:config and search for security.warn_viewing_mixed. If it's set to false, set it back to true again.

Seeing which URLs are fetched from unsecured connections

Firefox 16+ will show you mixed content in its "Web Console".
Open it ...

Under certain (unknown) circumstances, Rails will give localized files an invalid content-type in the Response header. For me, after requesting corporate_information and rendering corporate_information.de.html.haml, Rails sent a content-type of de.html instead of the expected text/html.

There are some discussions on this topic that offer workarounds, but no...

Shows how to implement an animated progress bar in pure CSS, without animated GIFs, Javascript or Flash.

Huge set of 315 free vector icons. You can choose which one you'd like, add your own SVGs, then download everything as an icon font or series of PNGs.

You can get up to 925 icons once you pay $59.

url = 'http://www.foocorp.com/foo/bar'
URI.parse(url).host
# => www.foocorp.com

Note that this will raise an error if the given argument is not a URL.

If you need the host's full URL without path, query, fragment etc., use URI.join with a clever twist:

url = 'http://www.foocorp.com:33546/foo/bar?query=foobar#hash'
URI.join url, '/'
# => http://www.foocorp.com:33546/

While git branch will show you all branches and highlight the current one with an asterisk, it can be too cumbersome when working with lots of branches.

To show only the branch you are currently on, use:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

Haml 3.1.2 displays single quotes in FormBuilder#text_ field html escaped. You may see something like that:

David's Chapter

Looking at the page's HTML, your field's values will be doubly escaped:

<input ... value="David&amp;#x27;s Chapter" />

Updating Haml to 3.1.5 or newer will fix it.

In theory you can take any scope and extend it with additional joins or conditions. We call this chaining scopes.

In practice chaining becomes problematic when scope chains grow more complex. In particular having JOINs in your scope will reduce the scope's ability to be chained with additional JOINs without crashes or side effects. This is because ActiveRecord doesn't really "understand" your scope chain, it only mashes together strings that mostly happen to look like a MySQL query in the end.

**I don't generally advice against u...

ActiveModel::Errors is used to handle validation errors on Rails objects. If you inspect an instance, it feels like a hash (to be more precise, it inherits from Hash):

errors = ActiveModel::Errors.new(Object.new)
=> {}
>> 
?> errors.add(:base, "foo")
=> ["foo"]
>> errors.add(:base, "bar")
=> ["foo", "bar"]
>> 
?> errors
=> {:base=>["foo", "bar"]}

If you need to hack anything with these errors, beware that it behaves in a special way. If you iterate over the errors it will decompose arrays.
For ...

Hashrocket Lunch n' Learn #1 with Avdi Grimm: Making Little Classes out of Big Ones

A look at the pros and cons of four different techniques for breaking a too-big class into smaller pieces.